Gay Marriage Trucker Hat

Oh, you KNOW you need one of these: The Gay Marriage Trucker Hat.

Just proclaim yourself an honorary gay, and poof! you're in an illegal marriage!

Overload the system.

And now we have shirts for the boys AND the girls at Cafepress.

(Yeah, yeah, so Germans already declared themselves Honorary Jews, so it's not an original idea, but that wouldn't be the first time.)

My characters are all Ignorant

Remember that story I was bitching about?

I think anybody who knows my work knows I love High Concept. That little hook, that connection between ideas, that has to be in a story.

"Inauguration" just threw the hook at me. This thing is going to get off the ground. A reader favorite -- Leutnant Winzig -- has a history that the Peach knows all about.

What the Peach doesn't know about is the wall they're both heading for. Winzig is one of the Unknowing Dead. He doesn't know, either.

YET.

Stinz and the Barr Girls

The Barr Girls are hassling Stinz over at Webcomicsnation.

They're the Cow -- uh -- Boys of the AfterReich. Good with a lariet, and know they look good in a short skirt.

They can rope anything with four legs. Stinz has four legs.

Will Eisner -- Expressive Anatomy for Comics and Narrative

Denis Kitchen of Kitchen Sink Books always thinks of me when he's been producing handsome new books.

One of the handsomest he's been behind lately is "Will Eisner -- Expressive Anatomy for Comics and Narrative."

It's a big, handsome, chunky thing, 8" x 10" and about an inch thick, with a matte two-color-style cover (dark red and black on a deep red background).

Eisner did a lot of anatomical drawings, including some beautiful, lively skeletons. Kitchen worked with W.W. Norton & Company to use pages from Eisner's stories to illustrate posing the human body, and expressing human emotions.

Christmas is coming....

$22.95 ISBN/EAN: 978-0-393-33128-8

You don't care about marketing, do you?

I know, I know, I should be writing about what I'm writing, but for at least two years now, I've been heavily involved in publishing.

AND I've been experimenting with my books to try to make them usable for webcomics and black and white and color books. This hasn't always been easy; it's been three steps forward and two steps back the whole way.

The brain is interested in what it's been doing recently. Cells involved in recent activities flood out cells involved in older activities. So the mudflats in my head are pretty much katrina'd over with publishing muck.

To try to get an art hurricane to re-flood the flats, I began doing a story practically freehand; more like webcomics are produced, than my old, careful, complex story-telling method. I wasn't really happy with it. I've always loved black and white better than color, but color looks so GOOD on webcomics! And I post everything now. So the nuts-and-bolts of producing books is getting in the way of my storytelling. I know too damn much about publishing now, and it's growing thorns in the mud.

I had a color story three pages in, and then Obama went into the White House. So this nasty little story that featured Leutnant Winzig kind of hit a brick wall. Which is probably a good thing.

My childhood love of bloody anatomy REALLY didn't need to get loose at a time like this.

And Dinosaurs are Extinct

I've been having a conversation with a guy on Facebook. He put together an "independent bookstore" group, and I happily posted my sites for getting books, including my POD contacts.

First of all, I adore little privately-owned stores. The big box places just can't compete with the ambiance.

Secondly, I am not directing this at comics shops, because YOU get it. YOU're in the 21st century, and you already know how to do this. There's a reason why more and more shops are getting shinier and nicer, and it's not just the girls buying manga (okay, so a lot of it is girls buying manga, but how is that a bad thing?).

I figured it would make privately-owned bookstores happy that they could get the books at near wholesale, including for specific customers I would be happy to drive toward their stores in their town. I can send "official dealer" labels to them as I do to my show representatives, and frequently-asked questions lists, anything to help them move product and make money for all of us.

The group owner got very angry about my promoting my books on the message board. I didn't understand why they wouldn't want all the author input they can get. I mean, these are the producers of the product they're pushing. New product could get new customers. Don't they want new customers? I know I do!

Then I got this line:

"We do not seek authors, authors seek book sellers."

These are those little brick-and-mortar self-owned stores who are screaming about Amazon. I think the guy might have been angered because I have those Amazon ads on this site, and Amazon is eating their lunches. There's a reason Amazon is stealing their cupcakes:

These must be the people who want to sit in their little store and pick put lists from publications they know, and send books back to be shredded if they can't sell them. Never mind that this keeps book prices going higher and higher, as distributors demand huge markups and make both publishers and stores pay for shipping.

These prices are making POD competitive, especially when it makes it possible for a bookstore to order only what they need into their shop, to make any customer happy. The personal touch turns customers on. Why else do they come to signings and go to shows to see their favorite authors? Keeping the prices -- and the shipping -- down certainly would have customer appeal?

Wouldn't the very private nature of an indie bookstore make it possible for an owner to deal with the authors -- more of them all the time, including the biggies -- who are building on-line customer bases? With it so easy to make promotional materials, an author and a bookstore working together could shedule all sorts of wonderful events?

A breakdown between the stores and the authors -- there's the problem. Amazon makes it possible (well, more possible -- I don't want to give them THAT many points) for authors to move book on their site and talk directly to the customers. And drive in customers in the first place.

It can't be that hard for the indie bookstores to do that? Surely they have laptops and dsl?

States I've been to -- What about yours?

If you'll look in the left column, you'll see a map of states I've been to.

Want to help me fill in the map?

Get your store or gallery to fly me in for a show or a signing!